37 Fernando Pessoa Quotes on Life

Fernando Pessoa quotes on life

2. Myth is the nothing that is all.

3. All beginnings are unvoluntary.

13. Everything is worthwhile / if the soul isn't small.

18. Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.

19. ... And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.

20. I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

26. We are two abysses -- a well staring at the sky.

28. The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodre. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion.

35. The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

36. I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

40. Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life.

42. As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

44. Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being.

55. Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one.

59. The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax.

62. You breathe better when you're rich.

66. Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.

68. My life is as if you've hit me with it.

71. The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.

73. There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

74. I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

78. All problemas are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be.

98. To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.

100. The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

101. Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

103. What is art but the denial of life?

104. Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it.

110. My curiosity sister of larks.

111. If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.

120. If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

125. All is absurd.

126. The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

127. What would happen to the world if we were human?

129. Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.

135. It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.

138. Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

146. Life is a thread that someone entangled.